


Watching the Sun

by enmity



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, setting: COM/Days to KH2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:09:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23602102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: Boy meets girl. Problem is, one of them isn't supposed to exist.
Relationships: Kairi/Roxas (Kingdom Hearts), some sora/kairi
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	Watching the Sun

Kairi writes letters to the boy she doesn’t remember. It’s a ritual she does, something to keep her hands busy through classes and homework and bored nights spent looking for the second star outside her window.

She writes all the things she wishes she could tell him, if he were here; scribbles them in the corners of notebook pages and cut-up scraps of craft paper, putting thought to words with a feverish intent, because she feels them slipping away already, memories fraying and undoing like threads from an old sweater, and soon she’ll forget what it was she meant to say, so easily.

Like it doesn’t matter, like it was never important to begin with.

Just like she forgot all about _him_ and how he’d laugh and lean his shoulder on hers under one of the trees overlooking the everlasting horizon, and—and some part of her thinks that maybe she made him all up.

So she writes. She clings to the blue of his eyes (she looks up to the sky a lot), and tries to approximate the curve of his smile—sometimes awkward, always earnest—and finds herself with a half-smile of her own, too. She wears white one day, then black another, enduring the stares and comments, hoping the change will be enough to jog her memory somehow.

And when it isn’t enough, she sits in her room in her cotton pink pajamas and writes, _I’m sorry_ , her marker bleeding sunset red into the lined paper, because she doesn’t dream about him as often anymore, and she’s almost completely forgotten what his voice sounds like.

“I’m sorry,” Kairi says aloud, to the ceiling, and she’d ask Riku but Riku’s gone too, off traversing the bright edge of the worlds, a man on a mission too far away for her voice to reach, and the thought sinks inside her, powerlessness twisting her stomach.

She collects her letters, all the fragments of thoughts not said. There’s an apology hidden in each and every one, and the sum of it all is a plea:

She wants him to be real. 

.

Selphie humors her, sometimes, joining Kairi’s stroll to the beach on one of her bright and endless whims, but most of the time she goes alone, relishing the golden sparkle of the sand and the dividing line where sky meets sea. The same view she sees every day, but she scrutinizes it still, eyes fixed at the horizon in the hopes of pulling a memory from it, a fragment of something intangible, something enough to tug her into a revelation.

The sunset today is shatteringly bright. The color of his hair blends right in, chestnut and burgundy bleeding into orange and gold, and if it weren’t for the inky black he wears from the neck down, she thinks she might’ve missed him completely.

He’s crouching on the ground, examining something in his hand and Kairi’s mind cycles through several thoughts: _hey, he’s cute! Bet that hair takes a lot of gel to maintain—or is it natural? Is he a tourist? That would explain the weird outfit… Ah, but it’s the off-season, isn’t it? He should be in school, like I am… Oh, God, even the gloves are leather…_

Buoyed by a sudden, crazy impulse, she tries to call out to him, but instead of a, “hey,” what comes out is a choked-off, “Sor—”

She quickly presses her mouth shut. What did she just say? She feels very stupid, all of a sudden.

Too late, though. The stranger turns around, attention piqued, and Kairi sees then the tiny, shining thing clasped in his hand: a seashell, plain and off-white.

“Uh,” he says, fingers raking through his hair self-consciously. He puts a hand behind his back, hiding the shell from view; he looks like he’s just been caught doing something he shouldn’t, and Kairi can’t help but tilt her head and smile. “Can I help you?”

He’s not a tourist, he says, sounding quite insistent, and when she asks his name, he gets an odd look on his face, a frown tugging down the corners of his mouth as he shakes his head. _Cagey, huh,_ Kairi thinks, and there’s a sad, sullen tinge to his expression that she doesn’t notice until she peers closer at him, squinting just a tiny bit. It’s a little bit like Riku.

She blinks a few times, and changes the subject. She mentions the seashell. “I’m from here,” she says brightly, “I know where all the best ones hide. Why, you’ve never been to the beach before?” and laughs lightly.

“Not… really.” He shakes his head again. “But I have a friend who really likes these things.”

“You can make good-luck charms out of them.”

“Weird,” he mumbles. “She told me the same thing.”

“Wait here!” Kairi says, sprinting over to a far edge of the beach, and comes back with her breath a little short and three of the prettiest shells she can find. His gaze lingers curiously on the blue one, a shade that matches his eyes. How fitting. She presses the shells onto his palm. “I’ve got a good eye searching for these. You will too, with practice.”

But he’s already looking away, towards the horizon. Longingly, and she knows that look, recognizes the way it mirrors her own, and yet his is _more_ —aching, she thinks distantly, at the same time she wonders other things entirely.

“I see this place a lot. In my dreams. Never thought I’d stumble on it in the real world…”

Kairi narrows her eyes, “Do you always speak in cryptic?” _Bet that makes him popular with the girls._

“Well, sorry,” but he laughs, a low sound muffled behind a gloved hand, more for his own amusement, like he just told himself a hilarious inside joke.

Kairi opts to ignore it. “You’re giving a gift to your friend, aren’t you? How thoughtful.” She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, sneaker soles carving ridges in the sand. In the distance, the sun is sinking, slowly draining the sky of all its colors; against the growing darkness, the boy’s hair just flattens into a less vibrant shade of blond—but her locks dim into a color closer to charcoal.

Eyeing the hooded coat wrapped around the boy, she’s not sure she likes the contrast.

“She’s sick right now. I’m hoping when she wakes up, this’ll cheer her up. It’s funny,” he pauses thoughtfully, “you remind me of her. A little.”

She laughs impulsively, “Weird! I was just going to say the same thing. There’s this boy I know…”

“Really? What’s his name?”

She thinks to say, _no fair! You didn’t tell me_ your _name._ Thinks to say, _you have the same eyes._

Instead she sighs, “I wish I could remember. Some friend I am.”

And the sky goes out overhead, like a dying candle.

.

She writes him another letter, three days later. Her favorite pen’s almost out of ink, and she scribbles hurriedly, looping letters haphazardly, “I met a boy who looks just like you and yet nothing like you. (Sorry. I’m not sure that makes sense.)”

She crosses that out, tries again.

“I saw a boy. He was dressed in this gloomy, most uncomfortable-looking black coat—I thought he must’ve been a tourist, with a weird outfit like that. Wouldn’t give me his name. We talked a bit; he was looking for shells. ‘For a friend,’ he said. Like the ones I used to gather for you and Riku—I made a charm out of some, for you. At least, I hope I remembered that right.

“I waited for him at the beach the next day. But he didn’t come back.

“He reminded me of you. You think I must be hallucinating, huh? I miss you so much I’m seeing things, and I don’t even remember who you are.

“I’m sorry,” Kairi whispers, and grabs a bottle of ink, blotting out the page in a smear of black.

.

But she comes down to the beach again the next day. And the next and the next and the next.

.

She opens her eyes to—darkness, at first, stretching inky and endless and for a moment she thinks she’s going to fall, and she braces for impact before the light penetrates in, so bright and sudden she has to fight the impulse to cry.

Once the sparks in her vision settles, _he_ comes into view, standing in the twilight, and she almost does a double take. “I see you lost the coat,” is what she manages to say, through the surprise and the lump in her throat, even though what she thinks is, _who’s Namine? I’m not Namine!_

“I remember you now,” he says, looking equally surprised, “you’re that girl he likes. You’re… Kairi.”

“And you’re…”

The aching look returns.

“I’m Roxas.”

Kairi comes to and Selphie is holding out her hand, looking worried. “Are you okay?” her friend asks.

She’s not sure.

.

She gets kidnapped hardly a week later.

The man in black is tall and spindly and coatrack-thin, his hair wild and red like fire. No amount of her hissing and threats cajole any reaction out of him besides mirthless laughter, and between spooking her with his pyro magic and telling her to “stop screaming like a banshee already, princess,” he keeps mumbling about a boy named Roxas.

It figures.

.

The smile he wore when she saw him fading away looked like one of resignation. Sora was too distracted to catch it, but she saw the way Roxas’ shoulders slumped, just slightly, as he merged back into Sora’s silhouette.

She wonders if she was meant to.

.

.

.

She asks Riku about it, weeks after they both return home to the islands. She waits until the fanfare has settled some and for things to ease back into a comfortable rhythm—and one evening, when it’s late and she’s absolutely certain Sora’s too busy dozing off to the television showing a re-run of a movie marathon, she corners Riku in the kitchen to drop the question that’s been eating at her for days.

“That man, Axel…” she bites a corner of her lip, shifting on her feet, “the one who kidnapped me? He said he wanted to see Roxas again.”

Under the light bouncing on her kitchen’s tiles and linoleum, she can practically pinpoint the exact moment his expression shifts, hardening into that face that isn’t as unreadable as Riku might fancy. It’s the face that pushes people away, the one that would rather sink into sullen silence than answer difficult questions. But Kairi continues meeting his gaze.

“What does it matter what Axel says,” he replies tightly. “He wasn’t a good person.” _Not a person at all_ , the sentiment goes unsaid. _Not a whole one, at least_. _Nobodies aren’t real; nobodies can’t feel._ All the rote explanations Kairi can hear faintly echoing in the back of her mind, sometimes, reverberating in a voice she doesn’t recognize, when the edges between herself and her other self blur and Namine’s most painful memories manifest as Kairi’s nightmares—and those nights she wakes up shaking. “You know what he would’ve done to Sora, right? We needed Roxas to—” he sighs, “Without him, Sora would never wake up. Or worse; he’ll wake up to a world where he’s as good as nonexistent. A world where nobody remembers him.”

When she takes a moment too long to formulate a response, Riku adds: “It’s for the best, Kairi. He’s a Nobody; would you have rather doomed Roxas into an incomplete existence, forever?”

His voice is distant, clipped, yet there’s an unmistakable pang of hurt in the words, and Kairi feels achingly the regret he doesn’t let himself feel, because he’d been willing to give everything up just to bring Sora back, once, and now he _is_ back and smiling with them and she has to wonder, too, that _isn’t this what they wanted?_ Why is she making things so difficult?

Riku’s footfalls grow distant as he moves down the hall, and she hears the creak of the front door opening, the click of it shutting—leaving her alone with Sora and his ghost.

“I know,” she murmurs silently to her glass of water. “I just wish there could have been another way.”

 _Riku’s right,_ Namine whispers, soft voice echoing in the imaginary hallways of her mind. _It’s really for the best. We never had any other choice. We were the lucky ones; nobodies like us were never even supposed to exist._

She wonders how many more times she has to hear those words in her other’s voice until her heart can finally believe it.

.

Kairi writes letters to a boy that’s not supposed to exist. She writes them in the back of her mind, collecting paragraphs out of the words she doesn’t dare say aloud to Sora or Riku. They rot, unsaid, forever caught in her throat with her breath whenever she looks too long (too hard) at Sora and sees a glimpse of his other shifting restlessly in a way Namine never would, a shadow of a boy moving just a fraction off-rhythm to the rest of Sora’s self.

It catches her by surprise every time, and she’s not entirely sure if he means to make fun of her when he wrinkles his nose at the sight of her bristling. (Maybe she deserves it. She’s been kidnapped and manhandled one too many times to be so startled by a friendly apparition.)

“I’m not a ghost, you know,” he says, once, looking down at his hands—half-transparent, the way they’d been since he merged—and laughing softly. “I’m still alive. So stop treating me like one.”

_I wish we could’ve talked more. I know it’s not fair. You liked him, didn’t you? You were friends._

She doesn’t say any of that. She thinks someday she’d like to. Instead she reaches out to grab his hand, feeling the warmth spreading under her skin, and when she says, “You’re right,” she means that this is the realest he’s ever felt, since the day they met and she’d gathered those seashells and pushed them gently into his upturned palm. “You’re real.”

**Author's Note:**

> STUPIDLY CLICHE SUMMARY FOR A SHIP THAT SHOULDVE STAYED IN 2007 (god it's even AU. help)


End file.
